by Orhan Pamuk
Forty or so “friends”—most of them historians like Semavi Eyice or literary figures—contributed to the Istanbul Encyclopedia for thirty years without ever receiving a single payment. Some, like Sermet Muhtar Alus (who wrote memoirs and humorous novels of nineteenth-century Istanbul—its characters, its mansions, and the mischief perpetrated by its pashas) and Osman Nuri Ergin (who wrote a detailed municipal history and published a famous guide to the city in 1934), belonged to an older generation that was dying off as Koçu’s first volumes were coming out. As for those from the younger generation, in time they would distance themselves from Koçu “because of his caprices” (as Eyice put it). And so the rituals of the endeavor—the long conversations in the office and the longer evenings in a neighboring meyhane—became less frequent.
Between 1950 and 1970, Koçu liked to begin his evenings in conversation with friends at the encyclopedia offices, retiring later to a meyhane in Sirkeci. There were never any women with them: This celebrated band of writers lived in an unapologetically male world that might be deemed the last representation of Divan literature and Ottoman male culture. With its familiar female stereotypes, its zest for romance, its association of sex with sin, filth, trickery, deception, perversion, degradation, weakness, disaster, guilt, and fear, this traditional male culture manifests itself on every page of the encyclopedia; during its thirty-year span, only one or two women ever wrote an entry. Eventually the all-male meyhane evenings became such an important part of the writing-publishing ritual as to merit their own entry: in “meyhane nights,” he claims that he and his literary contemporaries were following a fine tradition and went on to name the Ottoman poets who had likewise been unable to accomplish until they had first been to a meyhane. Once again, he rhapsodizes about the beautiful boys who fetched them their cups of wine; after his pen traces the delights of their clothes, and their sashes, the delicacy of their features, and their general elegance, Koçu goes on to declare that the greatest writer of the chroniclers of meyhane nights is Ahmet Rasim. His elegant but decorous love of Istanbul and his flair for living tableaux made him as great an influence on Reşat Ekrem Koçu as his mentor, Ahmet Refik.
In both the Istanbul Encyclopedia and the serials he “based on real documents” for the newspapers, Koçu took Ahmet Rasim’s racy stories of old Istanbul and made them shimmer with evil, intrigue, and romance. (The two best examples are “what happened in Istanbul when people sought love” and “the old meyhanes of Istanbul, their exotic dancing boys and male women.”) Taking advantage of the loose Turkish copyright laws, he quoted liberally from his master—sometimes too liberally but always in good faith.
The forty years between the birth of Rasim (1865) and Koçu (1905) saw the first newspapers published in the city, the long westernizing reign of Abdülhamıt and its political oppression, the opening of the universities, the protests and publications of the Young Turks, the admiration of the West in literary circles, the first Turkish novels, the great waves of immigration, and many greater fires; what separates Istanbul’s two most eccentric writers even more than the flux of history are their views on western poetics. Having in his youth written western-inspired novels and poems, and accepting failure at an early age, Rasim came to see excessive western influence as an affectation, a “blind imitation”; it was, he said, like selling snails in a Muslim neighborhood. Moreover, he found western ideas about originality, literary immortality, and the cult worship of the artist as excessively “foreign” and adopted, instead, a more humble philosophy worthy of a dervish: He wrote for newspapers to earn his living and because he enjoyed it. Inspired as he was by the endless liveliness of Istanbul, he saw no need to suffer for his “art” or, indeed, to create “art” that might last. He simply wrote his columns as they came to him.
Koçu, by contrast, was utterly unable to free himself from western forms: Obsessed with western classification systems, he viewed science and literature with the same western eyes. And so it was difficult for him to reconcile his favorite subjects—the oddities, the obsessions, and the weirdness of life in the margins—with his western ideals. Living in Istanbul, he knew little about the literature of romantic perversion then thriving on the margins of the West. But even if he had known of it, he issued from an Ottoman tradition that expected its literati to operate not on the margins, not in the perverted underground, but out in the open, to engage in instructive dialogue with society’s centers of culture and power. Koçu’s first dream had been to be a university professor; after his expulsion, his next dream was to publish a major encyclopedia. His overriding desire, one senses, was to establish some authority over his “strange imaginings” and give them scientific legitimacy.
Ottoman writers who shared his taste for the city’s liminal world had no need for such concealment. In the Şerengiz that was so popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these writers were able to extol the city in all its guises while also extolling the virtues of that city’s beautiful young boys. In fact, these poetic city books freely juxtaposed verses about boys with verses about the city’s beauties and monuments. A random perusal of any prominent Ottoman writer—say, the works of the seventeenth-century traveler Evliya Çelebi—is enough to understand how literary convention allowed poets to praise the city’s boys in the same terms one might use to extol its mosques, its weather, or its waterways. But finding himself in the oppressing, centralizing, homogenizing grip that the westernizing movement brought with it, this “old-fashioned” Istanbul writer was left with very few ways in which to express his “socially unacceptable” tastes and obsessions. And so he took refuge in the encyclopedia business.
There is still something rather quaint about his understanding of encyclopedias. Somewhere in From Osman Gazi to Atatürk, which he wrote after abandoning the first Istanbul Encyclopedia, Koçu alluded to Acaibu-l Mahlukat, a medieval book of “wondrous creatures” by Kazvinli Zekeriya, describing it as a “sort of encyclopedia.” This, says Koçu, with a kind of nationalistic pride, is proof that, even before the Ottomans fell under western influence, they were writing and using encyclopedialike books; this touching comment shows that he saw an encyclopedia as little more than a haphazard collection of facts in alphabetical order. Nor does it seem to have occurred to him that there is a difference between facts and stories, that there needs to be a hierarchical logic that gives some things more importance than others and casts light on the essence and the processes of civilization—put another way, some entries should be short and others long, and still other entries—ipso facto—omitted altogether. It did not occur to him that he served history; he thought history served him. In this sense, Koçu resembles the “powerless historian” in Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History—homing in on historic details to change the history of his city into the history of himself.
He was powerless because—like those pure collectors who rate things according to subjective value, not market value—he was sentimentally attached to the stories he spent so many years digging out of newspapers, libraries, and Ottoman documents. A happy collector (usually this is a “western” gentleman) is someone who—regardless of the origins of his quest—is able to bring order to his assembled objects, to classify them in such a way that the relationship between different objects is clear and the logic of his system transparent. But in Koçu’s Istanbul there was not a museum comprising a single collection (now there are several). Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopedia is not so much a museum as one of those cabinets of curiosities that were so popular among European princes and artists between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. To turn the pages of the Istanbul Encyclopedia is to look into the windows of one of those cabinets and see its seashells, animal bones, and mineral samples with an awe tempered just slightly by a smile.
Book lovers of my generation greet any mention of the Istanbul Encyclopedia with the same affectionate smile. Because there is half a century between us, because we like to think of ourselves as more “western” and “modern,” there is a
certain curling of the lip when we utter the word encyclopedia. But there is also compassion and understanding for the innocent optimism of a man who thought he could take a form that took centuries to develop in Europe and, in his own haphazard fashion, master it in one fell swoop. Behind that gentle condescension is the secret pride we take in seeing a book from an Istanbul writer caught between modernity and Ottoman culture, one that refuses to classify or in any way discipline the anarchic strangeness. Especially a book in twelve huge volumes, all of them out of print!
From time to time I meet someone who for one reason or another has been obliged to read all twelve volumes: an art historian friend of mine who’s researching Istanbul’s demolished Sufi tekkes, another friend who’s trying to learn more about Istanbul’s little-known hamams. After we have exchanged knowing smiles, we are overcome by a deep urge to compare notes. I ask my researcher friend if he’s read that in the old hatnatns, in front of the doors to the male sections there were a number of junk peddlers who washed the perforated shoes and mended clothes. My friend will throw me back a question of his own: In the same volume, in the entry entitled “Eyyubsultan Turbe plums,” how does it explain why a certain sort of Istanbul plum is known as a Turbe? And who is Sailor Ferhad? (Answer: the brave seaman who on a summer’s day in 1958 saved the life of a seventeen-year-old youth who’d fallen off an island ferry into the sea.) Now we turn to speak about Arnavud Cafer, the Beyoğlu gangster who in 1961 killed his godless rival’s bodyguard (as described in the “Dolapdere Murder” entry), or about “the domino players’ coffeehouse,” where enthusiasts of this game, mostly from the city’s Greek, Jewish, and Armenian minorities, once gathered to play. This brings the conversation to my family in Nişantaşı, because we played dominoes too. As I recall the old toy, tobacco, and sundries stores of Nişantaşı and Beyoğlu that once sold domino sets, we begin to lose ourselves in memories and then nostalgia. Or I’ll talk about the “Underpants Man” entry, which describes the aesthetically circumcised procurer who wandered from city to city with his five daughters, who were, like their father, much loved by businessmen coming to Istanbul from Anatolia, or the “Imperial Hotel,” so loved by western tourists in the mid-nineteenth century, or “shops,” in which he describes at length how and for what reason the shops of Istanbul change their names.
Once my friends and I feel the old melancholy settling over us, we begin to realize there is more to it than that. The real subject is Koçu’s failure to explain Istanbul using western “scientific” methods of classification. He failed in part because Istanbul is so unmanageably varied, so anarchic, so very much stranger than western cities; its disorder resists classification. But this otherness we complain about begins, after we have talked for a while, to look like a virtue, and we remember why it is we treasure Koçu’s encyclopedia: because it allows us to indulge in a certain chauvinism.
Without falling into the strange habit of praising Istanbul’s strangeness, we acknowledge that we love Koçu because he “failed.” The reason why the Istanbul Encyclopedia could not succeed—and it is the downfall of all four melancholy writers—was the authors’ ultimate inability to be western. To see the city with new eyes, these writers had to cleanse themselves of their traditional identities. To be western, they set out on an irreversible journey to that twilit place between East and West. As with our three other melancholics, Koçu’s most beautiful and profound pages are the ones that remain between worlds, and (again, like the others) the price he paid for his originality was loneliness.
In the years after Koçu’s death, in the mid-seventies, every time I went to the Covered Bazaar I would stop at the Sahaflar Secondhand Book Market next to the Beyazıt Mosque and find the final unbound fascicles and volumes that Koçu published at his own expense in his final years, sitting among the rows of yellowed, faded, mildewed, cheap old books. These volumes, which I began to read in my grandmother’s library, were by now being sold at the price of waste paper, but still the booksellers I knew said they found no takers.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Conquest or Decline? The Turkification of Constantinople
Like most Istanbul Turks, I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with Hagia Sophia and the red-brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant that there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. People like me were, after all, the first generation of the “new civilization” that had replaced them. But as strange as Reşat Ekrem Koçu had made the Ottomans sound, at least they had names we could recognize. As for the Byzantines, they had vanished into thin air soon after the conquest, or so I’d been led to believe. No one had told me that it was their grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren who now ran the shoe stores, patisseries, and haberdashery shops of Beyoğlu.
One of the great pleasures of my childhood was to go to Beyoğlu with my mother and wander in and out of its Greek shops. They were family enterprises. If we went into a draper’s and my mother asked to look at damask for curtains or velvet for cushion covers, the background sound was of mothers, fathers, and daughters chattering to one another in rapid-fire Greek. Later, back home, I liked to imitate their strange language and the excited gestures of the girls at the counter when addressing their parents. From the household reaction to my imitations, I was made to understand that the Greeks, like the city’s poor and the denizens of its shantytowns, were not quite “respectable.” I thought this must have something to do with the fact that Mehmet the Conqueror had taken the city away from them. The 500th anniversary of the Conquest of Istanbul—the “great miracle,” as it is sometimes called—took place in 1953, a year after my birth, but it was not a miracle I found particularly interesting, apart from the stamp series they issued to commemorate it. One stamp showed the ships emerging from the night, another featured Bellini’s portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, and a third displayed the towers of Rumelihisarı, so it could be said that the series as a whole was a procession of all the sacred images associated with the conquest.
You can often tell whether you’re standing in the East or in the West, just by the way people refer to certain historical events. For Westerners, May 29, 1453, is the Fall of Constantinople, while for Easterners it’s the Conquest of Istanbul. Years later, when my wife was studying at Columbia University, she used the word conquest in an exam and her American professor accused her of nationalism. In fact, she’d used the word only because she was taught to use it as a Turkish lycée student; because her mother was of Russian extraction, it could be said that her sympathies were more with the Orthodox Christians. Or perhaps she saw it neither as a fall nor a conquest and felt more like an unlucky hostage caught between two worlds that offered no choice but to be Muslim or Christian.
It was westernization and Turkish nationalism that prompted Istanbul to begin celebrating the conquest. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only half the city’s population was Muslim, and most of the non-Muslim inhabitants were descendents of Byzantine Greeks. When I was a child, the view among the city’s more vocal nationalists was that anyone who so much as used the name Constantinople was an undesirable alien with irredentist dreams of the day when the Greeks, who had been the city’s first masters would return to chase away the Turks, who had occupied it for five hundred years—or, at the very least, turn us into second-class citizens. It was the nationalists, then, who insisted on the word conquest. By contrast, many Ottomans were content to call their city Constantinople.
Even in my own time, Turks committed to the idea of a westernized republic were wary of making too much of the conquest. Neither President Celal Bayar nor Prime Minister Adnan Menderes attended the 500th anniversary ceremony in 1953; although it had been many years in the planning, it was decided at the last moment that to do so might offend the Greeks and Turkey’s western allies. The Cold W
ar had just begun, and Turkey, a member of NATO, did not wish to remind the world about the conquest. It was, however, three years later that the Turkish state deliberately provoked what you might call “conquest fever” by allowing mobs to rampage through the city, plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities. A number of churches were destroyed during the riots and a number of priests were murdered, so there are many echoes of the cruelties western historians describe in accounts of the “fall” of Constantinople. In fact, both the Turkish and the Greek states have been guilty of treating their respective minorities as hostages to geopolitics, and that is why more Greeks have left Istanbul over the past fifty years than in the fifty years following 1453.
In 1955 the British left Cyprus, and as Greece was preparing to take over the entire island, an agent of the Turkish secret service threw a bomb into the house where Atatürk was born in the Greek city of Salonika. After Istanbul’s newspapers had spread the news in a special edition exaggerating the incident, mobs hostile to the city’s non-Muslim inhabitants gathered in Taksim Square, and after they had burned, destroyed, and plundered all those shops my mother and I had visited in Beyoğlu, they spent the rest of the night doing the same in other parts of the city.
The bands of rioters were most violent and caused greatest terror in neighborhoods like Ortaköy, Balıklı, Samatya, and Fener, where the concentration of Greeks was greatest; not only did they sack and burn little Greek groceries and dairy shops, they broke into houses to rape Greek and Armenian women. So it is not unreasonable to say that the rioters were as merciless as the soldiers who sacked the city after it fell to Mehmet the Conqueror. It later emerged that the organizers of this riot—whose terror raged for two days and made the city more hellish than the worst orientalist nightmares—had the state’s support and had pillaged the city with its blessing.
